Avoided them like the plague for the first years - thought that they were sub-Helmet/Pantera cock rock, done with minor innovations. And I thought that their videos were annoying.

Then late one night in Sept. '97 or so I staggered in from a bender at 2AM, collapsed on the couch and surfed on the cable, hitting Music Television right at the start of the video for "Stinkfist."

Holy Christmas was that crazy. It took me back to the first time I saw the Hellraiser movie - disturbingly twisted otherworld. And I was really impressed with the song's sounds and structure.

Bought that record (AEnima), and although there is non-musical filler that I could give or take, and some of the songs maybe go a verse/chorus more than necessary, I discovered a fullness of appreciation for what they were doing.

I'd use an analogy at this point - the distance between the pap of Creep by Radiohead and the excellence of the OK Computer record, which I also discovered in the same manner around this time (after having written them off for years.)

Bought Lateralus when it came out, and, well, really liked it. Liked the songcraft and the sounds, excluding the drums which sound like they were recorded in a cardboard box with a microphone made out of cardboard. The album is maybe two songs too long, but I really liked the development of the record.

I did get the chance to see them live, and it was quite good when focused on the music and the performers. The meathead contingent were, as always, an extremely useless part of the experience.

Tool gets a lot of flak, and rightfully so 'cause of their history. But now it seems incorrect to me to lump them in with current cock-rock such as Korn or Linkin Park or Pantera or the Biscuits of Limp.

More appropriate to slot them nearer to prog-tinged music, more like mid-period Yes, King Crimson, and even Melvins, Chavez and Don Cab. Of course that is not to say that they sound like any of the aforementioned, but there is a particular way of listening to detailed music associated with each.

My old band got to play and travel as part of the Lollapalooza side stage a few years ago (actually 10 years ago...jeez) and our slot was the slot right before Tool's slot which was pretty fitting as we played mostly quiet jazzy children's music at the time. Doh! Anyway, every day we would show up at noon and the Tool crew was already there (not Tool, their crew) and they were busy changing all the drum heads on all the drums and another guy was changing all the bass strings on all the four basses (the bass he USED, the backup bass, the backup's backup bass, and last but not least the ol' 'Billy Baroo' bass just in case). They did this every single day. I assume there was a guitar tech changing all the guitarists' strings but he must have set up his shop in their bus or something. Anyway, we asked the bass tech if we could have the old sets of strings (as they were only one day old and most of them were not even played upon) so he was nice enough to NOT cut the strings off but rather unravel them and gave us a big box of full sets. I still use those strings to this day and the box is not even half empty. Ah, the spoils of sponsorships!

a tollerable band, but they certainly don't live up to their acclaim (especially musician-wise). all their songs sound exactly the same; open drop d chords a la Helmet, drumbeats that are nothing but synthetic tom fills, bass with flange or chorus or something equally gheigh, terrible lyrics sung in an 'arabic' scale, etc. it's no less formulatic than nickleback.

On the other hand, after analyzing a few key songs with some people who knew a little more about the band, I came to the conclusion that Tool might be a joke band.

If this is true, Tool is a work of true genius. That means that Tool is directly marketing to a convinced group of Nu-Metal kids and pointing out that they are all morons for liking their music. They would have also duped the music industry in that case. Funny.

I doubt that this is the case though. Tool most likely have a lot of completely retarded lyrics, that are so retarded that it could be taken as them making a joke. Still funny.

Although... Tool has given a select group of Nu-Metal morons the idea that they now have a band to be pretentious about. I'm always hearing that Tool is a group of musical "masterminds" and that I am just not musically educated enough to understand the band's genius. Now this is by far the funniest part about the band. I love being told that I don't know anything about music by a kid wearing an extra large Korn shirt laden in hemp neclaces. Ha.

The singer of this band punched me in the face and broke my glasses, so I have to give em a not crap for that alone. Their music? Who cares.
They opened for Henry Rollins when I was in high school and they were just starting, I jumped on the stage, as was pretty common in those days...before I can jump off, the singer runs up and screams 'Get off my stage you fucking stoner!' and punches me right in the face. To this day I wonder why he called me a stoner, I had short hair and was wearing a nice shirt and wasn't stoned. Funny story, later that same night Mr. Rollins choked and pretty much body slammed the other kid I was there with for doing the same thing. Ah, the good ol days.

I like this band Tool more than most bands that I like a good deal. I think what they do, they do tremendously well and rather evocatively. I also think they have progressed considerably from their early incarnation, particularly after parting with their original bassist.

Their guitarist does all their videos, which may just be a Brothers Quay homage but still work considerably well.

Their drummer teamed up with Dale Crover on the third of the Melvins "trilogy" records to deliver a few minutes of mind-bending drum attack that I defy anyone not to at least give a nod to.

Their singer, pretentious and formulaic though he may be, also has a great voice and screams better than anyone I've heard since Roger Daltrey.

Their bassist clearly does a lot of drugs. I like a good, drugged-out bassist.

If the music moves you, you understand why I like this band. If it does not, you probably think I am some nu-metal fuckball for wearing their shirts. I don't care. I vote them not crap.

I never thought I'd recover from the trouble that Youtube put me through...

For now I consider them 'not-crap', but I admit that I liked them a lot more when they seemed to be more humorous about what they did, rather than completely submerging themselves into occult/ritual magic(k) nonsense. With Lateralus I find Ticks and Leeches to be their least accomplished/most embarassing song; so whiny, they did better with "hooker with a penis".

so funny for me to see that Opiate is so shat upon! my first introduction to Tool was in '92, by this guy who also introduced me to Melvins and Phish that same year. i thought Opiate was seriously kick ass, considering i was coming from a Met-tal background and they were doing Met-tal better than most folks at that time. Met-tal was pretty dead by '90, '91, so '92 it was like, ugh. Opiate was nice. i dug it. also, we listened to the Undertow. i liked this Undertow as well, but not nearly as much as Opiate, because it seemed to me to be more self-conscious, and more fancy-pants. but i still liked it. there was a day i sat down to see if i could learn some of the bass parts, and i came to the conclusion that there was really like one song on that album, over and over again. so maybe i liked it a little less when i found how easy it was to play along, but i still liked it. after that, they kinda went off the deep end. they went super-tech, all fancy-pants, and so artsy i wanted to puke. i didn't like them so much after that.

i still wouldn't call them crap, but i find it weird that i'm like the only person in the whole world who thinks they've gotten progressively less listenable as time goes on, instead of more. hrm!!

LVP wrote:If, say, 10% of lions tried to kill gazelles, compared with 10% of savannah animals in general, I think that gazelle would be a lousy racist jerk.

clearly not crap...like, obviously the occult-esque stuff on their website and artwork is at least half tongue in cheek, and if you can't get past that, then you're missing the whole point of the band. no one can say they're bad players...you might not dig the tunes and whatever, but it's skilled playing if nothing else. i happen to think that they're cool songwriters too...obviously they operate in a very small range in the musical spectrum, but they do what they do rather well. more than one band has tried to emulate it. and to say that they're just as formulaic as nickelback is going a little far. i mean, i see what you're getting at, and i agree to a point, but to compare them with those jokers just shows a lack of respect for what tool has accomplished. and yes, lots of meathead idiots like them, but that just means they're getting their point across. if you're doing metal and meatheads don't like it, then you're doing it wrong. like, if it only appealed to geeks on messageboards, then it wouldn't really be that dangerous or influential, would it. in other words, they'd be slint, and it would be musically semi-interesting, but ultimately uninspiring. art for art's sake only gets you so far, and tool knows this. they're not geniuses, but they play well, and they play loud, and know how to affect people. and reaching people is what it's all about, right?

On the other hand, after analyzing a few key songs with some people who knew a little more about the band, I came to the conclusion that Tool might be a joke band.

If this is true, Tool is a work of true genius.

There is an element of truth in this.

I was briefly rehearsing with a band that toured with Tool four years ago and from the stories that they told there is very much a underlying attitude amongst Tool that it is all a bit of a joke. All of the so-called occult-experimental mathematics-imagery etc. is a total con. In fact the whole image that the band convey seems totally contrived.

All the info I got was second-hand but it all seemed to sound about right. The current bassplayer is a English guy that was in a stoner-rock band called Peach. After putting two-and-two together Tool seems like that end result of some prog-metal-hippies not far shy of still wearing purple tie-dyed Lep Zep t-shirts and a great marketing dept.

As far as my opinion of the music, Aenima is a fun record. Lateralus sounds a bit overly ernest and samey, the rest are dated and a bit boring

clocker bob may 30, 2006 wrote:I think the possibility of interbreeding between an earthly species and an extraterrestrial species is as believable as any other explanation for the existence of George W. Bush.

tool had a huge impact on me as a teenager (not terribly long ago). i haven't listened to it in a while, but:

drummer: plays exciting, chopsy stuff in a way that works really well -- probably because the songs are practically written around his playing.

guitarist: riffs are kinda dumb. but i mean this board is all about melvins, right? they play some dumb riffs, eh? guy can't play a guitar solo but can make fun squiggly noises that function as a "solo"

bassist: gets better with each album, by "lateralus" plays a bigger role than the guitarist

vocalist: great voice. knows it maybe a little too much leading into certain divaisms, particularly with "a perfect circle"

lyrics: definitely good moments, but once overly fixated on anal sex, then overly fixated on hippy new age mumbo jumbo.

I'd have to agree... Tool, Radiohead, et al. are provocative only if you look at them in terms of their market... For MTV bands that play on late night talk shows and SNL, they're creative... Compared to music marginalized-for-it's-brilliance, they're not that good...

I remember seeing Radiohead play that really bad song from Kid A on SNL. It's such a bad song. Same drum hip hop beat through the whole song. Yet, it's the one they chose to play. For all their weak artistic inclination, they play the lamest, blandest tune on that overrated album!

I don't even think for their market, they're that innovative. I'd take Incubus or Korn over those guys any day...

And if you look at what Shudder to Think was able to pull off on a major label, well, it puts Tool and Radiohead to shame...